"There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot" - Aldo Leopold

2011/01/23

Thoughts of a sleep-deprived brain

Note: This will be a pictureless post, so if you are someone like me, who doesn't like long posts without any photos, please click away. This is also a very self-centered post, so no comments will be allowed for now.

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Foreword

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It is quite amazing how your brain operates at a sleep-deprived state - when you go to sleep at midnight, trying to fall asleep despite the loud walking and guitar playing from your neighbor above you, and waking up when your father has to go to work at 4am in the morning. After that, when you want to sleep, your brain decides to work at this time of the hour and your body can't do anything except toss and turn. At this time of the day, your brain processes things strangely and it becomes quite an interesting journey of self-discovery.

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One.

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My brain was on the issue of how most people view the environment after watching this short documentary of UK celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey investigating shark finning in Asia (Taiwan, this case). Definitely worth seeing, but he did get a few things wrong about Taiwan, but that's not the point of this post.

That morning, my brain was thinking how most people view the world and it came to several interesting ideas. It would be quite cool if I have diagrams (or better yet PowerPoint slides) of these ideas, but that would take way too much time.

First, most people view Earth as two things (or circles). You can imagine them as a Venn Diagram with some overlapping. One is the human world, which includes the cities and the typical everyday surroundings of an urbanite. The other is the natural world, which is the forest, the ocean, and the things that urbanites typically don't see on a daily basis, except on television, such as BBC, National Geographics, etc.

Now, imagine there is a large straw sucking things from the natural world into the human world, and these things such as trees, fish, wildlife, etc. (There is also a straw pumping our wastes and pollutants into the natural world.) The people that are operating at this sucking straw are fishermen, hunters, tree-cutters, etc, which represent giant industries worth billions and billions of dollars. They take the resources they suck up and they go through a web of processing and manufacturing until these items become things in our home and our bellies. Therefore, humans at the end of this web of processing has lost all connections with nature and it becomes difficult for them to associate they things they just bought or ate as a part of nature. That is problem one.

The second and third problems are the people at the sucking straw. These people treat themselves, their groups, their companies, their countries as individual entities. They all think that it is I who is taking from the natural world so it is acceptable. They forgot that when the power of one are grouped, the power becomes enormous and destructive and abusive. The third problem is the economics as these industries are worth a lot of money and people at the this level will suffer greatly if they are all out of jobs. The constant battle between nature and money will always continue and it will always be nature on the losing end, until Mother Nature decides to strike back and end this unjustified nonsense with a few earthquakes here and these, throw in a few tsunamis, and light up a few volcano eruptions. You get the picture.

Everything is not all bad of course. At the opposite end of all the mania, there is a small (very small) dropper of medicine being applied to the natural world. And it is people that care about nature that are applying this medicine to the natural world. Through research, conservation, and positive direct impacts with nature, the natural world is being treated one step at a time (often too slow).

It would be quite amazing if we can balance out the sucking (and polluting) straws with the medicine dropper so that the natural world can also heal itself to get better. But of course, that will never happen.

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Two.

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This is just fresh off my mind from last night - I am a species of one.

I just realized that my life is an evolution in the making and it is quite fascinating that I go through birth and reborns to get to the state I am in now, and will continue to go on several more.

From the year I was born to my second year in university, I was mostly a fish in a school. I was swimming with the mass without any sense of direction or seeing where I am going.

In my third year of university, I started to leave school of swimming fish and sometimes taking breath from the air above. Still sightless but there is fewer predator above and air smells like of nice.

In 2008, I made first venture out of water and it is fantastic. I am able to breath and I have sight, and the world above water is beautiful and I am enjoying my time up here. I think I am a Mudskipper right now.

I can't wait to start developing legs and running and maybe flying. How exciting.